Budget 2023 | No capital gains if you convert physical gold to digital gold — How will you benefit?

If you convert physical gold to digital gold, there will be no capital gains or tax, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in her Budget speech on Wednesday. The conversion of physical gold to Electronic Gold Receipt and vice versa is proposed not to be treated as a transfer and not to attract any capital gains. This would promote investments in electronic equivalent of gold, the FM said.

Electronic Gold Receipts can be defined as depository gold receipts that can be traded on the stock exchanges. They are similar to stocks and are traded and held in Demat accounts, just like them. Under this form of gold, the trading exchange holds the underlying value of the receipt in physical gold in a vault.

As of now, long-term capital gains tax is applicable when the gold is sold after three years of purchase. LTCG on gold gains is 20 percent with indexation benefit (Indexation is used to adjust the purchase price of an investment to reflect the effect of inflation on it).

With the new proposal in place, there will be no capital gains on the exchange. This will make safe-haven asset easier to access and promote investments in the electronic equivalent of gold, experts said.

"The move to not impose any capital gains on the conversion of physical gold to electronic gold receipts and vice versa will help further gold monetization. This announcement may help in reducing the import of gold,” said Colin Shah, MD, Kama Jewelry.

Any profit or gain that arises from the sale of a ‘capital asset’ comes under the category ‘income from capital gains’, and hence individuals need to pay tax for that amount in the year in which the transfer of the capital asset takes place. This is called capital gains tax. The two types of Capital Gains are short-term capital gains tax (STCG) and long-term capital gains tax (LTCG).

On custom duty front, the custom duties on articles of precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum has been increased from 20 percent to 25 percent in Budget 2023. The  Agriculture and Infrastructure Cess (AIDC), which was previously nil, has remained unchanged. The social welfare surcharge (SWS) has been removed in the current revision. The increase will come in effect from February 2, 2023.

Experts say that this will lead to a rise in the final price of locally made jewelry and maybe challenging for the local refineries.